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I'm shooting my first barrel race in a covered arena. My quality stinks and I can't get rid of the "red eye" in the horses with my photo shop red eye tool. How can I make this subject much sharper and get rid of the reflection in the horses eye?

Had a explanation written out and thought of something that made think to start over before I hit the submit button. Tell what aperture and sync speed(shutter speed) you were using at the time of these pictures. And what mode you set the camera to. I don't know if the 1Ds has a program mode.Judging from the pictures, it looks like you're in an in between area with the light in the arena, iso 800, and the strength of your flash. Only one picture looks like you're getting enough light from the flash. The other two you're basically getting just the available light. And they're a little under exposed. So your flash doesn't seem to be strong enough to reach the distances you're aiming for. That could be due to what power setting you had it on, or what mode you had it on. So you're in between not enough available light for iso 800 to get a fast enough shutter speed to cut down the motion blur, but it gives you most of your exposure. And not enough light from the flash that you could use that to help freeze the motion and get a good exposure.Now to get rid of the red eye, use the elliptical selection tool on the red part and desaturate the color out of it so that it looks like a regular catch light.

Okay. Ordinarily I would say don't use program. But depending on what flash you have, if it's dedicated to Canon and has thru the lens metering, it might actually work.But you are in that in between area. There's enough available light to get most of the exposure at iso 800, but not enough to give you a fast enough shutter speed and get a complete exposure.And your flash wasn't strong enough to reach the distances.So what you can do is try an iso of 400, and use a higher power setting on the flash. Reducing the iso will take some the exposure away from the ambient light and shift it to needing to come from the flash. And hopefully you'll be able to increase the power of it, because it already wasn't enough at iso 800. That way, some of the action stopping will come from the flash duration.250 is a pretty good sync speed, so we can live with that. You still may get some ghosting.Or you could try the highest iso setting your camera has and try going without flash. You may be able to get 1/500 if you take it up to iso 3200.And also they seem to be out of focus. That will help improve the sharpness of them.

Do you happen to know if a Canon Speedlite 580EX II is compatible with a EOS 1 Mark II? I've been reading my flash manual, and wonder if it's even compatible. Even though it fires and I can change some settings, when it comes to the symbol that is suppose to show up on my LCD monitor that means its compatible, it's not showing.

Canon website says E-TTL operation with all Canon digital slr cameras. However it also says the ability to control flash functions and settings from the camera menu is 1D mach III only. So I think that's the reason the symbol you're looking for is not there.I'm used to using manual on my flash when it comes to using flash with a telephoto and action. And if your flash has a distance scale on the back, you can go that direction as another way of doing it. You can use the lens to find the distance of locations that you'll most likely get your pictures. And use the flash distance scale to determine which power level to use based aperture you want to use and how much available light there is.

If I felt I had to or it would be better to use flash, I'd decide which iso to use based on what I'd get with just available light. Like if iso 800 wouldn't quite get me the shutter speed I want, I might try iso 800 with flash, or drop down and use flash. And that would be for the reasons I said above about sometimes, based on light and sync speed, you might need to set things so that you're not in that in between area of not being able to freeze motion enough with not enough available light alone, and too much with available light and flash together.So if I decided to use iso 400, I'd set the iso/f stop scale to 400. Second, using your barrel racing as an example, I'd use the lens to estimate distances. This is where I'm shooting from, that's where the horses circle around the barrels, you focus on the spots and check the lens to estimate how far it is.If I were doing something like a football game, I'd judge it by knowing how much of the frame I wanted to fill with the players with the photos, and standing in this position I'll typically be at a good range for how most of the action plays out. So I wouldn't try shooting when somebody is say, head to toe in the frame, taking up less the half the viewfinder. I may still follow the action, focusing and being ready, but wouldn't bother taking a picture till the action came closer. Or I'd move closer before the play starts.Third, once I estimated my distances, I'd choose a power setting that gave me enough to reach it with the extra amount of light from the flash. So using how the flash is set to in the picture, say iso 400 gave me a shutter speed around 100th at f/2.8. And I found that my shooting distance was around the 50-80 ft range. My sync speed is going to be higher than 100th, and that means using a power level that gives a little extra. And I see that 1/4 power is around f/2.8 for the distance I'm doing.So I am going to get some exposure from available light, but because of the sync speed under exposing ambient light, and getting extra light from the flash but not quite enough for a f/2.8 aperture at that distance, you end up with a good combination.It takes some practince and getting used to, and you're also going to be depending on some of the exposure latitude if you try it. I know it may sound like a whole lot, especially typing it out, but it really is something that when you start doing it more, you get a feel for it and know "this is my shutter speed in this kind of light, this is my sync speed, so if I use this power level on the flash, this is how my pictures will look".

Thank you soooooo much, I'll try it this week and see what happens before the big barrel race the first weekend in July. Never have had to shoot without the sunlight. Nerve racking! Thank you again. I'm printing this all out and taking it with me.